The Squirrels Are Watching

Moving!

2006-09-05T07:33:00.000+08:00

I ruminated a whiles ago about moving to Wordpress, and I've gone ahead and done it. Unfortunately, wordpress.com sucks -- you can't upload your own themes and plug-ins, so I sucked it up and bought hosting. The Squirrels Are Watching is now available at thesquirrelsarewatching.com. Andrewfong.com will also redirect to there.

Open-source AIDS vaccine?

2006-07-22T18:15:00.000+08:00

Bill Gates tries an an open-source approach to finding a cure for AIDS. Wonder if anyone's asked them why this doesn't apply to Windows too?

More in common ...

2006-07-19T08:45:00.000+08:00

Oh look, India's banned blogspot too!

Report a Chicken

2006-07-16T22:27:00.000+08:00

In the Mong Kok MTR stop, Argyle Exit (D), there's a "report a (mosquito?) chicken and be pleasantly surprised" sign.

7-Eleven + Chicken = Self Reporting Station, Prevent a chicken left close? My translating ability needs work. Perhaps it's a reference to Bird Flu?

Beyond Whiteness

2006-07-16T22:09:00.000+08:00

I dunno, sounds like something that'd cause cancer.

A Scarlet Letter Crime

2006-07-16T21:58:00.000+08:00

How serious of a crime is theft in Hong Kong? Well, apparently it's worthy of big red A. Sticker located near some place that sells suits across the street from G2000 (?) in Mong Kok.

Eye Infections

2006-07-16T21:46:00.000+08:00

This Hong Kong ad by the Jordan MTR station tells us to wash our hands because clearly, hovering land sharks with white hats are the number one cause of eye infections.

The Search and the Clickstream

2006-07-16T13:07:00.000+08:00

"The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture" (John Battelle)
Ellen Kim gave me this book before I took off, and I read it while in Hong Kong. She also gave me Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner), really interesting stuff as well, but there's nothing in it I feel like blogging about (the fact that the book is back home is contributing somewhat to that disincentive).

Anyhow, The Search is worth blogging about, but there's a lot to cover, so it'll be over a few posts. The first thing worth thinking about is, as Battelle calls it, the "clickstream." The clickstream, loosely put, is the sum of everything you do online. It consists of which websites you go to, what terms you search for, and what items you buy. In other words, it's a digital paper trail.

By mining that clickstream, we can create, as Battelle puts it, a "database of intentions." As far as business is concerned, that means being able to know exactly what consumers want, when they want it, and, with a little web magic, getting it to them on the spot. That's the power of search.

More on the flip.

What makes this particularly interesting for me is how this information gathering mechanism relies only on the subconscious consent of the user. When most people use the web, odds are, they're only thinking about the explicit purpose of that usage. That is, I'm using Flickr to share some photos I took while hiking yesterday. I'm using my blog to keep my friends updated on the current dreary state of my life life. I'm using YouTube to share with folks some funny ass shit I filmed at my my best friend's birthday party. And so on.

What people don't consider is how much information the sum of all those interactions provide about a person's life. For example, as a user, most people don't think that when they use Flickr, they're announcing their brand preferences. They may simply be sharing a photo of a birthday party for instance. Yet in the background of that photo, I might notice an empty Coke bottle. And if, while watching your Flickr photostream long enough, I notice more instances of Coke than Pepsi, I could probably conclude that you prefer the former over the latter.

And while that single instance seems mostly harmless, there's a lot of data that can obtained this way. As you upload more photos and videos online, it's the equivalent of announcing your brand preferences to every marketer in the world, providing detailed information about where you were at a particular time, and even providing hints about how you feel towards certain people (e.g. by looking at the body language in all the photos you two are together).

For those of you who've seen Minority Report , remember how early on in the movie, Tom Cruise uses the image of a merry-go-round in one of the visions to figure out where a murder is going to take place? It's something like that.

And with that example, we need to worry not only about overzealous marketers but about the government as well. The NSA doesn't need to look at your e-mail if it can figure out almost as much from your publicly available blog, Flickr account, YouTube videos, bulletin board posts, facebook profile, online dating information, and so on.

But that's not really the point. The government could always figure out stuff like this whenever it really wanted to. Police officers have using these tricks ever since Sherlock Holmes was written.

What makes this different is that information is now publicly available to ... well ... anyone. What keeps them from taking advantage of that information at the moment is that it's a huge pain to sort through all of it. Yet as search technology advances, that barrier will become increasingly meaningless.

On another note, I recommend checking out John Battelle's Searchblog.

The Piracy Trump Card?

2006-07-15T22:41:00.000+08:00

So as I was thinking how Microsoft could bring down the Great Firewall in an earlier post, I concluded, "What's the PRC going to do? Ban Windows?"

The answer I was thinking of was, even if it does, people would just get illegal copies of it. But since this isn't in Microsoft's interest, the PRC could force even a mega-standard like Windows to comply by simply threatening (subtly of course given its WTO commitments).

Maybe it's time for Microsoft to move to a new business model.

Playing God with Missile Defense

2006-07-15T21:47:00.000+08:00

This was started by the Essembly resolve:

An effective defense against ballistic missiles is in the best interest of the United States, and as such it should actively and aggressively peruse developing and deploying such a defense.

The link goes to the discussion I'm having with Andrew Berman about why I disagree. This is probably harks back to me debating why space-based weapons (i.e. Star Wars) is a bad idea during junior year of high school. So yeah, I'm not exactly approaching this with an open mind.

More on the flip.

My concern isn't really unique to missile defense though, but rather, harks back to this idea of the US playing world cop. I don't necessarily oppose that -- provided it's done right. My fear is just that it's not going to be done right.

Feasibility aside, if we actually did get a missile defense up and running--and assuming we deployed it worldwide (e.g. in space) --wouldn't that make us responsible for the launch of every missile around the world?

If Israel launches a pre-emptive strike on Iran, and we could have stopped it, but we didn't, isn't that effectively condoning a missile strike against Iran? As I mentioned in the discussion. It's like playing God. You get blamed for everything no matter what you do.

The way around this, sort of, is to clearly define when you will act and what that act consists of. Using Thomas Barnett's terms, we create a "rule set" about the usage of our missile defense system. Ideally, we get people to buy into that rule set as well.

It's the difference between the world cop adhering to the rule of law (even if the law is mostly written by himself) and the world acting as a vigilante making things up as he goes along. Who would you rather trust?

One part of me believes we can do this -- that someone has to be the world cop and that we can do it. Sure, we'll fail a few times, but eventually we'll get it.

But in light of things like Iraq, I can't say I'm terribly optimistic.

A Way Around the Great Firewall?

2006-07-15T21:11:00.000+08:00

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have found a way to circumvent the Great Firewall of China. Unfortunately, it won't do me much good since it involves "using special software or modifications to firewall software that would ignore RST packets to circumvent the Great Firewall," software that isn't readily available yet. And as the article notes, this doesn't offer that much of an advantage over encrypted proxy servers.

But given all my troubles recently, I'm willing to bet that finding encrypted proxy servers isn't exactly easy for the average user. And given that a fair chunk, if not most, of the Chinese don't really question the content the government is blocking (they think it's propaganda, porn, or both -- pornproganda!), you're going to have to make it fairly easy for them to access banned sites for them to do so.

More on the flip.

What makes this particular proposal interesting however (and you can read more at Richard Clayton's (one of the researchers) blog, is that he's proposing a solution that makes it easy for the user. Rather than have the user look for a proxy server, he's asking that content providers (i.e. website servers) and operating system manufacturers (i.e. Microsoft) work together to "ignore" the Great Firewall of China, or more broadly, produce a standard that makes it more difficult to censor access to particular pieces of Internet content.

Ultimately, I think that's the key to breaking down censorship in China. When people say that economic progress and globalization will loosen up this authoritarian state, there are two general assumptions behind this. The first is that a growing middle class demands freedom, has access to information from outside the country, yada yada. The second is the state, in order to function within this new global system, has to conform to certain standards of that system (which we assume is relatively good).

The problem is that China could just as well force the system to adapt to it (or create its own systems) rather than the other way around. The key then is to make these standards so fundamental to the system and to China's own national interests that it's forced to adopt those standards (e.g. plenty of dogs don't want to take their medicine, but if you mix the medicine in with their food, they'll scarf it down with knowing it).

As far as Internet access in China is concerned, the goal then is to integrate standards and technology that makes it more difficult for the government to control that access into standard technology (i.e. an operating system). And Microsoft knows how to integrate stuff into Windows. We're not just talking about the Cambridge solution of ignoring RST packets but other solutions that work as well (i.e. finding encrypted proxy servers). If these solutions are tied fundamentally into standard technology, and that technology is tied fundamentally to something the government wants (i.e. economic progress), what's the PRC to do?

Ban Windows?

Delaying a Switch to Wordpress

2006-07-15T11:32:00.000+08:00

So after a short stint on Blogger, I've been considering a switch to Wordpress. One of the more annoying things about Blogger is that there really isn't an easy way to implement tags or categories. Wordpress has categories built in, and given how easy it is to add in plugins, with something like Ultimate Tag Warrior, it's fairly easy to get tags up and running too. Given the general good press surrounding Wordpress, I though I'd give it a try.

Of course, Wordpress.com is banned in China. Wordpress.org is still up and running, but unlike the Blogger / Blogspot relationship, it doesn't allow me to access the Wordpress.com blog I set up. Ecto doesn't work either, which I guess is for the same reason. Furthermore, I can't even login via proxy. My guess is that I need to use an HTTPS connection, and finding a free public HTTPS proxy isn't as easy as finding a free public HTTP proxy.

More on the flip.

There are also a number of other Wordpress hosts such as Blogsome, but after opening up an account to play around with, their implementation of Wordpress doesn't seem to be up to par (no option to import existing posts for example).

Given that, I'm probably going to wait until I get back to the States to set up Wordpress. For now, Blogger'll do.

In the meantime however, I've already started adding embedded tags into these posts. You can't see them because I have the CSS hiding them, but if you look at the HTML source, you'll notice things like "[tag]Blogging in China[/tag]" at the bottom of the posts. This is the Ultimate Tag Warrior format for embedded tags and it'll allow me to easily transfer to Wordpress later on. Also, to handle extended posts in Blogger, I enclose the extended bit with <div class="fullpost"> ... </div> tags. In Wordpress, the delineation is to simply place  at the point you want to break your post into summary / full post sections. Given that adding it in the html doesn't affect Blogger, I've gone ahead and done that.

The nice thing about this is that it's fairly easy to use a search and replace to change all of these if I need them in a different format. As an added bonus, since I'm using Ecto to write up these posts on my PowerBook, I can easily export my posts to an RSS / Atom format to upload into Wordpress later on.

Blogging in China

2006-07-15T10:53:00.000+08:00

Blogging in China is a pain. Well, it can be at least. The Great Firewall of China works on several levels, sometimes scanning data passing through your connection and causing it to timeout if it doesn't like what it sees and sometimes just blocking entire IPs all together.

One of those blocked IPs is Blogspot. You can get to blogger.com, but you can't necessarily login and edit your blogspot page. You can use a proxy service like Anonymouse to get around it, but it doesn't work so well when you need to edit a blog page (i.e. you don't really want anonymous people editing your webpage). Fortunately, as you can you see, I'm still able to edit this Blogspot page.

More on the flip.

In order to get around the Great Firewall, I first tried using a program like Ecto. Ecto allows me to edit my blog offline and then sync changes through a XML-RPC connection. For some reason, although I can't edit my page via the normal HTML feeds, XML-RPC works just fine.

However, Ecto only allows me to edit posts, not edit all the other options on my page (e.g. layout and design). So the next thing I did was to try using a proxy server. The idea behind a proxy server is that instead of establishing a direct connection between my computer and a particular website, all data is routed through an intermediate first. Therefore, while the Great Firewall may block a particular website, it doesn't necessarily block a particular proxy. This allows me to access that website via the proxy. And finding a proxy isn't all that hard. All you have to do is Google "public proxy".

The problem is that while proxy servers can hide the identities of the users on both ends, they don't necessarily encrypt the data passing through. Therefore, the Great Firewall is still capable of scanning the content of data passing through the proxies, and, if it doesn't like what it sees, will block off access to said proxy.

For me, that meant an attempt to update my Blogspot template also meant me changing my proxy every few minutes. Use proxy. Connection dies. Find new proxy. Rinse. Repeat. And given how slow some of these proxies are (some of them are located in countries pretty far away), it became a pretty frustrating experience. Add in the fact that several proxies have their own "protection" software that keeps you from accessing certain sites (my guess if that some of these "public" proxies are really servers used by corporations that don't want their employees wasting hours on Blogspot), and it gets real tired real quick.

After about an hour of this, I finally got a decent connection and was able to make the minor template changes I wanted. But when I went back to look at my proxy settings, I had forgotten to check off proxy access and was actually using a direct connection to edit my Blogspot page. Maybe I made a mistake earlier about not being able to login via blogger, but my guess is that the Great Firewall suddenly decided to ease off what it was doing to make my life so difficult. In any case, I was left in the strange situation where I was able to edit my page via blogger but not able to actually see it (without a proxy) via Blogspot.

And I suppose that's the most annoying thing about the Great Firewall. Maybe it's just me and my limited knowledge of how the Internet works, but the firewall seems ridiculously inconsistent. Why block Blogspot.com but not Blogger.com? Why shut down a particular proxy but not shut down a list of proxies? Why am I even allowed to use a proxy service like Anonymous in the first place? Maybe it's intentional. The point of the Great Firewall isn't necessarily completely block access, just to annoy the crap out of the average user.

Blog Updates

2006-07-15T09:34:00.000+08:00

Okay, so the promised updates are about a week late. What can I say? I'm busy, and updating in China is a pain. More on that in the next post.

First, a few blog-related things. As mentioned before, I have a backlog of stuff I want to blog, so there should be a log of content going up relatively soon. For those of you who prefer content in smaller more regular doses, my apologies.

Also, I've just opened up del.icio.us and flickr accounts. I've also added some links to the side, so feel free to check them out.

More on the flip.

Regarding flickr, I've bought the extra bandwidth and uploaded just about every photo on my hard-drive, and I'm planning on uploading every photo on my parents' hard-drive back home once I get back from China. This means three things:

First, some of the photos on my hard-drive are not mine and I don't actually have the rights to redistribute them. I've tried to go through them and pick out such photos, but I may have missed any. If you see any such photos, let me know (f o n g a n d r e w AT gmail dot com).

Second, the quality of some of these photos really suck, and since I have no concerns about bandwidth, I didn't really take the time to check out how blurry each photo was. It's also worth noting that I am not a good photographer

Third, there are some wierd photos -- mostly of walls and floors. I do a bit of photoshop once and a while, and some of those pictures give me good ideas for textures or whatnot. Again, I just sort of chucked everything on there, so if you're curious what the wall of a Chinese template looks like, have at it.

Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license by the way, even if I haven't updated it on Flickr yet. Basically, that means you can use my photos for whatever, so long as you give me some credit (and link back to my Flickr page if the usage is online).

Happy 4th

2006-07-04T22:18:00.000+08:00

Happy 4th of July from the People's Republic of China. Have been lax on posting due to lack of time and the detrimental effect using English has upon my ability to use Chinese, but I have a huge backlog of things I want to post about that I'll work on getting up over the weekend.

Engrish in Hong Kong

2006-06-12T18:00:00.000+08:00

I really should care my camera around with me more often -- but as I didn't, you'll just have to take my word for it. Engrish, as you may know, is

a variation of English that is often found in Asian countries. While the term may refer to spoken English, it is more often used to describe written English, for which problems are easier to identify and record. Engrish has been found on anything from badly translated signs, menus, and instruction manuals to bizarrely worded advertisements to strange t-shirt slogans.

As I was heading down the Hong Kong subway system today (which, for the record, rocks), I saw a guy in a T-Shirt that said something along the lines of "Welll, how you doing? Circle." And then was followed by a string of random letters: Nxgre tegad edfts, etc. Granted, it's not as bad somethings in Japan, but this Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong, you really don't have an excuse. Sure, you've been part of China for nine years, but you were a British colony for 99 years! Every other sign here is written in English here -- some with worse spelling than others (there are a ridiculous number of "Wellcome" signs), and in a land of Asian parents, almost every school child is learning English right now.

Which begs the question: why the heck can't y'all spell?

In Hong Kong!

2006-06-12T17:52:00.000+08:00

Since my mother works for United Airlines, we often fly on "Employee Standby," which basically means that whenever a plane isn't full, we get to grab whatever extra seats there are. Sometimes, that means a seat in First Class. Or sometimes, like last week, it means no seats at all.

No wonder United employees are disgruntled. And here all along we thought it was the unions.

Long story short, it took three days for me to get to Hong Kong, but I'm here now (been here for two days actually, but I didn't get around to posting). I'll be heading to the mainland tomorrow to visit my grandpa's grave, return to Hong Kong for a day to get some last minute shopping done, and then it's off to Beijing for a summer of not speaking English.

Taiwanese Independence

2006-06-07T13:14:00.000+08:00

This is in response to the following essembly resolve: "We should support a democratic Taiwan's independence against a totalitarian China." I respect what's Taiwan managed to accomplish through democracy, legislative scuffles aside, and recognize that Taiwan is, de facto, independent (given that Taiwan once claimed to speak for the mainland, you could say that the mainland is independent), but I have to disagree that the US should support a formal independence movement.

I mean, why should we? In practice, the mainland does not interfere in Taiwanese domestic politics. Meanwhile, business is good. There's an occasional crisis over the strait, but by and large, things are fairly peaceful. There are, of course, problems that result from the mainland trying to speak for Taiwan -- e.g. difficulties in getting WHO assistance during the SARS crisis, no UN seat, etc. It seems possible, however, that these issues could be resolved without formally recognizing Taiwanese independence. In fact, we'd probably have better luck winning greater de facto independence if we could assure the mainland that none of these would lead to formal independence.

On the other hand, formal recognition leads to problems for everyone. I can think of three.

More on the flip.

1) This is bad for Taiwan. Best case scenario -- the mainland cuts off all trade with Taiwan. Given how Taiwan's economy is increasingly dependent on investment and trade with the mainland, this would be an economic disaster. Worst case scenario -- Taiwan gets blown to bits. That's why at least half of Taiwan's populace is still reluctant to call for independence.

2) This is bad for democracy movements in China. The last thing they need is American intervention over Taiwan sparking greater nationalism on the mainland.

3) This is bad for America. It puts our economic interests at risk, kills any chance of the Chinese helping us out with problems such as terrorism or North Korea, ties up military resources, and in the worst case scenario, gets us involved in a war more costly than Iraq.

In short, independence now risks a lot of bad things while there's nothing seriously wrong with the status quo. Even if you absolutely had to have independence for whatever ethnic or nationalistic nonsense you adhere to, there's no good reason why you have to have it now. The mainland is modernizing and liberalizing. Diplomatic ambiguity is a small cost to pay for waiting around until the mainland is a little more accepting of the possibility of Taiwanese independence.

I'm little short on time to find data to link to, so if you feel like finding the exact percentage of Taiwanese trade dependent on the good graces of the mainland, feel free to drop me a line.

My own domain name

2006-06-07T00:01:00.000+08:00

This site is now accessible via andrewfong.com. I'm using my own name as the URL rather than something like spooky-squirrels.com so I can change the name of this blog as I want to without having to update the URL.

Summer Plans

2006-06-07T00:00:00.000+08:00

FYI: I will be taking off for Hong Kong tomorrow. Around June 15th or so, I will be traveling to Beijing. I'll be there for nine weeks or so for the Harvard Beijing Academy. After that, I'll be spending a few days in Singapore for the HPAIR conference. I should be back in California on August 22nd or 23rd, from where I'll probably banish off to New York to help my cousin move into NYU, and then I'm back home for another week or so before heading back to Harvard.

This info will likely be changing a bit, so feel free to check out my Google Calendar. An XML feed can be found here and an iCal version can be found here.

Crossposting at CampusTap

2006-06-06T16:49:00.000+08:00

For those of you at Harvard, most of the material on this page will also be cross-posted at fongandrew.campustap.com. The reason for having two copies of the same page is to reach out to different communities. CampusTap is a collection of blogs by Harvard students -- so, being a Harvard student, I'm creating a copy there in order to play nice with that little project.

On the other hand, I'm maintaing this page on blogspot in order to draw traffic from the non-Harvard community and half-heartedly resist the isolation that being in the Harvard bubble entails. A little bit of AdSense revenue and the possibility of further Google integration doesn't hurt either.

The biggest disadvantage of having two copies of the same site (besides the extra workload) is that commenters on the different sites won't see each other -- but honestly, that's not a huge deal.

Long story short, browse whichever version you prefer. The posts are more or less the same.

Profound First Post Title Goes Here

2006-06-05T10:40:00.000+08:00

The point of this blog is simply to aggregate a bunch of the stuff I write online (i.e. Dem Apples, Essembly, Campus Progress, Daily Kos, TPMCafe, etc.) in one easily accessible page. And then some. Most likely on how the constant gaze of the campus squirrels is a metaphor for blog reading. I was going to use my Xanga for this purpose, but just saying that word "Xanga" conjures up images of high school angst. So the Xanga is dead. Maybe. Probably.

I'm not going to cross-post existing material onto this page, mostly because I'm lazy, so if you have some burning desire to see existing material, log onto those sites and search for stuff. The links above go straight to my diary/profile/etc. If for some reason, stuff doesn't show up, Google it.

Anyhow, this is a pretty boring first post. I understand that they're supposed to be bold and profound or something, but generally, if I say anything profound, it's the 5th, 6th, or 27th thing in that I say. I mean, my first words were probably babyspeak for "My butt is itchy; please change my diapers."

NB: My username for some of those sites was ACDC. This is before I realized that AC/DC was the name of a rock band from Australia. And no, I don't like their music. So I suppose I won't be using that username again.